Every year, roughly 3.6 million eviction cases are filed in the United States. That number, tracked by the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, understates the true scale—it captures only formal court filings, not the informal displacement that happens when tenants leave rather than fight, when landlords negotiate an exit without a hearing, or when people simply disappear before the sheriff arrives.
Of the cases that do reach a courtroom, the power differential is almost total. Studies of eviction courts across the country consistently show the same pattern: landlords are represented by attorneys in roughly 80 to 90 percent of cases. Tenants are represented in fewer than 10 percent—often far fewer. In some jurisdictions, the figure for tenant representation is closer to 3 percent.
The average eviction hearing, according to research published in the Yale Law Journal, lasts between three and seven minutes. In that window, an unrepresented tenant is expected to navigate procedural rules, assert affirmative defenses, cross-examine witnesses, and make legal arguments against an attorney who does nothing else for a living. The outcome is not a mystery.
The Architecture of the Hearing
Eviction proceedings are governed by state law, which means the rules vary—but the power structure is consistent. Most states use expedited summary proceedings for evictions, specifically designed to move cases quickly. Due process protections that apply in civil litigation more broadly—extended discovery, right to a jury trial in many cases, time to build a defense—are compressed or eliminated in eviction courts. The speed is a feature, not a bug: the legal system treats removal of a tenant as an administrative matter rather than a fundamental rights question, even though stable housing is among the most basic preconditions for employment, education, health, and safety.
Tenants have affirmative defenses available in most states: failure to maintain habitable conditions, retaliation for complaining about repairs, improper notice, acceptance of partial rent waiving the right to evict. But asserting those defenses requires knowing they exist, having documentation, and being able to articulate them coherently in a four-minute hearing without legal training. Most tenants cannot do all three simultaneously under pressure.
“We see tenants come in with evidence that would win the case—text messages, photos, repair requests—and they never get to show it because they don’t know how to introduce it. The landlord’s attorney objects, the judge sustains, and the tenant has no idea what just happened.”
The Record That Never Goes Away
Here is what most tenants do not know when they walk into eviction court: the filing itself—not just a judgment against them, but the filing—becomes a public record the moment it is entered into the court system. In most states, that record is accessible online. It does not require a conviction. It does not require a finding that the eviction was justified. The landlord files, the record exists, and the record is immediately scraped.
A cottage industry of tenant screening companies—including CoreLogic, Rent Bureau, TransUnion SmartMove, and dozens of smaller regional providers—purchases or aggregates eviction court data and sells it to landlords as part of tenant background reports. These reports are used to screen rental applicants. In most jurisdictions, landlords are not required to tell a rejected applicant why they were denied. The eviction filing—even one the tenant won, even one that was dismissed, even one that was filed in error—follows them to every application.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has designated tenant screening reports as consumer reports under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which means tenants have the right to dispute inaccuracies. But the dispute process requires knowing the report exists, knowing which company generated it, and navigating a dispute process with a company that has no particular incentive to remove accurate—if contextually misleading—information.
The Data Broker Ecosystem
Eviction court data is a product. It is collected, packaged, and sold at scale. The companies doing this are not operating in a legal gray area—court records are public, and aggregating public records is not, by itself, illegal. The harm is structural: the speed and comprehensiveness of automated data aggregation means that an eviction filing in Milwaukee in 2021 is instantly available to a landlord screening an applicant in Phoenix in 2026, without any mechanism for the applicant to provide context, contest the characterization, or demonstrate that the filing was retaliatory or erroneous.
Some states have begun pushing back. California’s AB 2164, signed in 2022, prohibited consumer reporting agencies from including eviction records in tenant screening reports for cases filed during the COVID-19 pandemic period. Maryland enacted legislation in 2023 requiring that dismissed eviction cases be sealed within 30 days of dismissal. Minnesota’s tenant screening reform law, passed in 2023, prohibited landlords from considering eviction records more than three years old and required that records from cases the tenant won be excluded entirely from screening reports.
Those are meaningful reforms. They are also three states out of fifty.
Right to Counsel—and Why It Matters
The most direct intervention available is also the most proven: legal representation for tenants. New York City established the first right to counsel for tenants in eviction proceedings in 2017, guaranteeing free legal representation to any tenant with household income below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. A 2019 independent evaluation found that in cases where tenants had attorneys, 84 percent of households were able to remain in their homes. The city estimated that the program’s cost was offset by avoided costs in shelter, emergency housing, and social services.
San Francisco, Cleveland, Newark, Philadelphia, Denver, Louisville, and more than two dozen other cities have since enacted right-to-counsel programs or pilots of varying scope. But these are municipal programs, unevenly funded, geographically limited, and absent from the suburban and rural jurisdictions where eviction rates per capita are often highest and legal resources are thinnest.
Federal legislation to create a national right to counsel in eviction proceedings has been introduced in multiple congressional sessions without passage. The Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act and related measures have not cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The Displacement No One Counts
The 3.6 million annual eviction filings are the cases that reach court. Behind them is a much larger number: research from the Eviction Lab and from sociologist Matthew Desmond’s fieldwork estimates that informal evictions—threats, lockouts, utility shutoffs, cash-for-keys offers made under duress—may outnumber formal filings by a ratio of two or three to one. These displacements leave no court record. They generate no data. They are invisible to every accountability mechanism that depends on court filings as the unit of measurement.
The families who experience informal eviction are not, in general, less harmed. They are often more harmed, because they have surrendered any legal claim, received no court date, had no opportunity to assert a habitability defense, and often leave without the security deposit they were owed.
If you are facing eviction, know your state’s notice requirements. Know whether your jurisdiction has a right-to-counsel program. Know that a filing against you is a public record from the moment it is entered, and that you can request the case be sealed if it is dismissed or decided in your favor, in states where that right exists. And if you have documentation of a retaliatory eviction, a habitability issue, or an improper filing, contact a local tenant legal services organization before your court date—not after. Contact RFA at tips@radiofreeamerica.press if you have records or a story about eviction court practices in your jurisdiction.
Methodology: RFA reviewed eviction court representation data from the Eviction Lab, state legislative records for California, Maryland, and Minnesota, CFPB guidance on tenant screening, and federal right-to-counsel legislative history. Investigation ongoing.